Friday, October 25, 2013

Your IGCSE School Guide

Your IGCSE School Guide

BUILDING A STRONG FOUNDATION

RAJ
BHUVA, A CLASS X IGCSE STUDENT AT DHIRUBHAI AMBANI INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL
SHARES HOW AN INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION HAS AIDED HIS HOLISTIC
DEVELOPMENT

Irecollect
a 13-year-old me romanticising the hardships and intimidating
challenges that the IGCSE course was going to confront me with. And now
as I step into its final year, I cannot help but smile at the roller coaster ride the journey has been. IGCSE
has completely altered the way I look at academics today. Laying a
greater emphasis on critical thinking and application skills, the course
has the potential to transform teenagers into creative thinkers with
global perspectives and cultural awareness. Initially, it can be
quite daunting to cope up with the completely different way in which
one is taught. Luckily for me, the much required skill of note-making
wasn’t really a problem. The completely application-based questions in
tests continued to catch one off guard.
But I eventually realised that the key to doing well in any subject lay
in fortifying one’s concepts as a foundation and to then use it in any
tricky scenario that the course might present. But, even being puzzled
by such situations is an amazing learning experience in itself; it
elicited nothing but a different, acute manner of thinking from me. It’s
true that at some point the course can prove to be very taxing,
especially in class IX and X, but needless to say it does have its
advantages. My English coursework,
for instance, was a great opportunity for me to explore the various
styles of effective writing while honing my skills of research and
structuring ideas or arguments. Even my science lab reports, whose
pickiness and length I perpetually would crib about, ironically made me
realise the importance of following an established order of scientific
enquiry. It was during class IX that another side of the IGCSE was revealed to me — one that dealt with the course and the exams from
an examiner’s point of view. I understood that the course was not
driven simply on ‘knowledge’ of the syllabi but also required one to
interpret what exactly a question demanded and therefore craft an ideal
answer. Thus, the course also had a technical aspect to it which could
not be aced by solely knowing all the curriculum content. I have since
learned to work smart and not necessarily hard. The unique educational environment
that my school provided has helped me immensely benefit from the IGCSE
curriculum and pedagogy. The Dhirubhai Ambani International School Model
United Nations (DAIMUN), exchange programmes, community service
initiatives, TEDx talks, Round Square and DAIS Leadership Series with
talks by leaders from many walks of life, are amongst the opportunities
that became an integral part of our studies. In short, through
its academic rigour and very demanding syllabus requirements, the IGCSE
has imparted me the valuable attributes of time-management, research,
innovative thinking, global outlook and the courage to think
out-of-the-box. It has indeed been an enriching experience to be part of
the IGCSE programme at DAIS.